coapp-developers team mailing list archive

["William A. Rowe Jr." <wmrowe@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/6/2010 9:54 PM, Adam Kennedy wrote:
> On 7 May 2010 11:20, Trent Nelson <trent@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Bill definitely has a valid point.  You'd be surprised at what kind of crazy builds you can end up with for some open source projects when you attempt to build them on Windows with their out-of-the-box settings (assuming their release even compiles on Windows; OpenSSL has the odd release every now and then that just flat out doesn't compile out-of-the-box on Windows).
>>
>> I remember how much trouble I had trying to get the out-of-the-box Windows builds of BerkeleyDB and TclTk to work with Python.  BerkeleyDB was using the most esoteric compiler and linker flags that I've ever come across, and the resulting binary, especially in 64-bit builds, just flat out wasn't suitable for linking against.
> 
> I concur on the state of 64-bit compilation, it's horrible at the moment.
> 
> Some of this is because MinGW doesn't support it (and the fork that
> does is still maturing) so the GCC-focused Open Source developers need
> some time to work out bugs.

Well that's issue is neatly summarized by the win64 choice of 64P architecture,
which isn't how any other OS structured their x86_64 architecture.  So it requires
individual developers to trawl through the projects cleaning up assumptions
such as sizeof(long) >= sizeof(void *) - and it's not the sort of trivial problem
that CoApp can solve on its own.